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Nicky Cooper - Wellness & Wellbeing Practitioner RN MSc, Richmond (2026)

11/09/2026

A student asked how many times I'd burned out.

I was standing at the whiteboard, mapping out my career for a room of learners. Thirty-five years, roughly sketched out in blocks.

“Many times,” I told her.

Then I pointed to those particular blocks.

I showed them where each one ended. Explained what was happening in my life and work at each of those points, and why I eventually had to step away.

I've been thinking about that conversation ever since.

I'm currently supporting soon-to-be nurses on clinical placement in some of the busiest areas of the health system, working alongside staff who are barely coping.

I've had so many conversations with public service professionals recently who are burning out.

I'm teaching, marking and supporting students, and it's a lot. Probably explains my meltdown last week.

And everywhere I turn, I see people in these same professions doing so much more than they have left to give. There's just nothing in the tank.

It's made me think again about that whiteboard.

Every one of those blocks had a workload behind it. A service that needed more staffing. Patients who needed more care. Targets that needed meeting. Someone, somewhere, watching all the numbers.

But I wasn't watching me.

I didn't recognise it was burnout in myself until I was already well past the point of choosing.

And by the time I stepped away, I didn't feel like it was a choice anymore.

That's the part I wish we talked about more.

Burnout doesn't always look like falling apart.

Sometimes it's becoming irritable. Losing the capacity to care about things you used to care about deeply. Starting to think, “I just can't anymore.”

And sometimes the first sign is when resignation starts to feel like the only way out.

We need to learn to notice our own warning signs. To recognise early enough when we're running on empty.

Organisations need to ask a different question too.

Not how to keep the service running, but what's keeping the people running it well.

You can keep squeezing more out of a person for a surprisingly long time.

Until eventually, there's nothing left to squeeze.

The organizational numbers may still look fine.

The person may very well not be.

08/09/2026

I exploded at everyone this weekend, yep not my finest moment *sigh.

I've been running on empty for a few weeks. Said yes when I should probably have said no.

Tired, overloaded, lots going on really. Too many little things requiring something from me when I just didn't have much left in the tank.

I'd been nudged earlier that I should change my work password. My intuition told me to wait till I was back in the office. But no, I did it anyway.

So over the weekend, while I was trying to mark assignments from home, I got locked out of my account by IT.

And no, it wasn't a huge catastrophe, but I felt like such a complete numpty, and that was the thing that finally tipped me over.

Then someone in my family said something, and a button got pushed.

And I full-on overreacted, then said something I regretted almost immediately.

Of course it escalated, as these things so often do.

And suddenly something that started off with me being completely overwhelmed landed on everyone I love.

I've spent a lot of time over the years sitting with couples, families and parents in the aftermath of moments like this.

The bit after the argument, vulnerable awkwardness, everyone still hurting.

And the person who wishes they could take back what they said or did. The person who isn't quite ready to hear an apology. Not yet anyway.

I've learned that just saying sorry isn't the same as repairing after a rupture.

It means being able to own it " I did that, and I know it hurt you, and you didn't deserve it.
I was feeling overwhelmed, but that's not an excuse".

And then sitting with whatever comes next.

Just being willing to take responsibility for what happened.

I had to do some of that myself this weekend.

I'm more than likely still doing some of it.

Because I'm self-aware enough to know that sometimes I lose my s**t too.

Sometimes I get overwhelmed and get it wrong.

Still human.

05/09/2026

Four years ago this weekend, I stopped drinking.

Stress was always where I wanted to disappear. And alcohol gave me somewhere to go.

It didn't start off that way, and I didn't always drink every day. There’s been plenty of sober periods in my life.

But when I drank, I always struggled to stop at one.

Looking back, I can see what alcohol had been doing for me.

Sometimes it helped when life was too peoply. It helped me to switch off.

It also helped me not feel what I didn't really want to feel.

But mostly, it was simply a coping strategy I'd learned to reach for when life felt like too much.

I don't think about alcohol much anymore. The five o'clock wine o'clock is just not there at all now.

And the thing that changed probably wasn't my willpower.

The last night I drank, I told myself it was the last time I would. Nothing major had happened. I just hated that I'd needed it so much.

And I've realised something uncomfortable.

Sometimes what we call a coping problem is actually a coping solution. And sometimes, it's a life problem.

We can spend years trying to become better at coping with something that is making us unwell.

Then blame ourselves when the coping strategies we choose aren't particularly healthy.

I know a lot of people are struggling with stress right now.

Functional freeze, burnout, alcohol, coffee, smoking, overeating, undereating, scrolling, overworking. The list goes on.

All ways of going somewhere else for a while.

We don't always talk about those sorts of things because, from the outside, we're still functioning.

Still showing up.

But functioning isn't the same as being okay. Not really.

Four years on, I don't really congratulate myself for having given it up.

I've just become more interested in understanding why I needed it in the first place.

Because in all reality, the most powerful change we can make isn't finding a better way to cope.

It's probably not needing to.

01/09/2026

“I've heard your name before”

I was doing an extra shift in another area when one of the care assistants recognised my name on my ID badge.

They'd nursed a patient I'd cared for many years earlier.

And suddenly I was taken right back to my third year of nursing. When I was still learning the ropes.

The patient had a type of cancer that affected their bones and eventually they became paralysed.

They knew they had months rather than years left, but desperately wanted to go home to die at home with all they knew.

The problem was that the package of care being offered wasn't quite enough for them to get back home.

The other option being suggested was residential hospital-level care. Which was completely against their wishes.

And I really wasn't ok with that. So I asked if the spouse would be willing to come onto the ward and work with me for a week.

I'd teach them all the things they would need to know to care for their life partner at home.

The senior ward staff agreed.

So for five days, we worked together.

Personal cares, rolling and turning, catheter/bowel care, and using the hoist.

All the practical things that suddenly become part of your life when you're caring for someone at home.

And eventually, this patient got to go home.

Years later, that care assistant told me they'd been part of the team caring for them at home.

They'd lived for another six months before dying peacefully, on their terms, with all they loved.

And they'd apparently heard my name because they had talked about me.

I've never forgotten this. Not because I was some amazing student nurse who had all the answers.
I really wasn't.

I just remember thinking that there had to be another way, and that we could do better.

I've been talking to my learners recently about person-centred and holistic nursing care. About meeting people where they're at.

And I found myself talking about this patient.

Because it's easy to say we always put the person at the centre of their care. But do we really?

It simply means listening to what they want. And giving them that sense of control back.

And that means asking a different question.

What would it take to make this possible?

28/08/2026

I put my nursing career on a whiteboard this week. As I was teaching my pre-health students about nursing as a career pathway.

Not just how to become a nurse, but where nursing can actually take you.

So I mapped out my own career as an example.
And as I started writing it out on the whiteboard, memories came flooding back.

Jobs I'd completely forgotten I'd done. Areas I'd worked in that had somehow disappeared into the background of 38 years of nursing.

People, places, experiences and little chapters of my career that I hadn't thought about for years. The whiteboard got fuller. And fuller.

ICU. Burns. Neurosurgery. Trauma. Cardiothoracic. Aged care. Palliative care. Rural health. Mental health. Community. Public health. Education.

And then the things that grew from nursing.
Postgraduate study. Teaching. Leadership. Different specialties. Different directions.
It was actually quite something to stand back and look at it.

My learners were fascinated. They asked a lot of questions. Seeing their own possibilities they hadn't even considered. Realising that nursing isn't simply hospital, ward, scrubs and shift work.

And then one of them asked me, what my favourite role had been. I had to think about that one.

Because there wasn't an obvious answer.
Different parts of my career gave me completely different things. A challenge here, a bit of heartbreak there.

Life lessons no textbook could have taught me.
People who changed how I saw the world.
Doors that simply opened into the next big thing.

I think the whole session benefited all of us.
They got to see what a nursing career can look like. And I got to stop for a moment and remember what mine has looked like.

I hadn't realised how vast my path had been until I decided to map it out.

A career taking shape...

24/08/2026

There's something I need to say about mothers.
The conversation around postnatal/partum mental health has been loud online lately. Perhaps it needs to be.

It's made me think a lot about how quietly some women struggle in the post natal/partum period.
I know this, because I was one of them.

My first pregnancy was a miscarriage, followed quickly by twins, born eleven weeks early, due to twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. My 3rd & final pregnancy was problematic too.

I've been a nurse all my working life. I know intensive care from the inside. And I understood the monitors, the alarms, and all the numbers.

What I didn't understand was what it would feel like to be a NICU mother sitting beside them.

Their first year of life is still mostly a blur.
I robotically mothered like an ICU nurse. Charted feeds, monitored outputs and just kept going.
I ran on adrenaline mostly.

Everyone vocalized their opinion about what I should or should not be doing.

Yet nobody asked how I was doing emotionally. Not really.

It looked like I was coping. I thought I was too.
Until the nightmares started. The hypervigilance. The exhaustion that was unrelenting.

I told myself it was what all new mothers went through. Eventually I sought help, cried, and was diagnosed with postnatal depression.

But looking back now, with everything I now know about trauma, I can see that it was only a small part of that story.

There had been a miscarriage. A high-risk pregnancy. A premature multiple birth. And months of a dysregulated nervous system.

Nobody asked about any of it. Not even me. Because I was still highly functioning.

Not every struggling mother looks like she's struggling.

Some are falling apart. Others are holding everything together so tightly that nobody can see what that's costing them.

I've since spent years asking women all of the questions nobody asked me.

How are you really? Do you feel like yourself? What do you need?

I've watched women finally answer, sometimes with relief, sometimes with tears held for so long they'd forgotten how long they were holding them.

Nobody held the mother.
Nobody held me.

Perhaps people have forgotten how to hold the mothers.

I haven't.

21/08/2026

Last week, one of my learners experienced their first death.

Their first time being there when someone they had been caring for died.

We talked about it afterwards. What they saw, what they felt, what surprised them, and what stayed with them.

There really is a first time for everything in healthcare.

The first person you see die. The first body you wash after death. The first family you have to tell that their loved one has died. The first time you walk out of a room knowing that person won't make it.

And we feel all of it.

The shock and sadness. The discomfort. Sometimes even the fear.

With experience, we learn to function alongside those feelings.

Sometimes that can look like desensitisation.

But I don't think becoming more experienced with death means we care less.

Our minds have protective mechanisms for a reason. We learn to compartmentalise because we couldn't possibly carry every death, every story, every family and every loss home with us.

That doesn't mean we stop feeling. We simply learn how to hold what we feel while still being there for the patient and family.

A learner hasn't had time to build those internal shelves yet.

Something that is expected in healthcare can still be completely shocking when you've never experienced it before.

And there isn't one right way to respond. They might cry, feel numb, want to talk about every detail, or have absolutely no words at all.

None of that tells us how much they cared.

We don't all process death in the same way.

When someone comes to you after their first difficult experience, don't assume they know how to process it.

They don't. They're learning that part too.

After we talked, they thanked me for taking the time to talk it through.

I told them something I've said to learners before.

"One day, you'll be having this exact conversation with someone else."

Because I remember my first witnessed death in healthcare.

It was 36 years ago, and I still remember their name and face.

Experience doesn't mean you stop feeling.

You simply learn how to carry it.

And one day, you realise you've become the person you once needed to walk beside you.

18/08/2026

Same entitlement and level of confidence that outran the skill behind it.

Different decade, and a very different workplace.

But this week, someone I was dealing with took me straight back to an old work colleague.

Years ago, a student came onto our unit for placement.

They were confident. Very confident. So confident it sometimes tipped into cockiness.

They pushed boundaries. Attempted things outside their scope of practice. And were a little reluctant to do the less glamorous parts of being on a team.

When the placement ended, they left with an opinion of us too.

Apparently, we were "a bunch of bi***es."

A few months later, they returned to the unit as a registered nurse.

Not because the manager wanted to employ them. Far from it. A decision made above them sent ripples through our team.

But they didn't really stay that long.

And at the time, I was feeling deeply frustrated.

So I also avoided them like the plague.

I'd mentored that student. I knew when their approach felt too slapdash for a specialty where slapdash can really cost something.

But I didn't say anything. I just stopped engaging.

Some may call it professionalism. I know it was avoidance.

Years later, what interests me now is the gap between confidence and self-awareness.

Confidence isn't competence. It isn't character either.

Character often shows itself when someone's ego is inconvenienced.

When they're told no, and when a boundary is set.

When they're asked to do something they might consider beneath them.

The most capable people I've ever met are rarely the ones trying hardest to prove it.

They're naturally curious, and they listen.

They already know what they don't know.

And can be wrong without losing the plot.

Their competence doesn't need to announce itself.

Neither does their character.

Confidence tells you how someone feels about themselves.

Character tells you how they treat other people.

14/08/2026

“I've met you before,” they said.

I was in a shop yesterday. The person serving me searched my face for a second, and then told me why.

Many years ago, their spouse's parent was dying.

There had been complicated family dynamics. And there was a lot of old grief tangled up in this new one.

The parent was angry. Not about the dying, but about how their own spouse had died, and the care, or lack of, that hadn't been there when it really mattered.

I don't remember all of the complexities of it. But I do remember the high emotions that day.

And I remember trying to meet it honestly, instead of trying to smooth it over or make it feel more comfortable than it was.

I told them the truth about what was happening, and what would happen.

What it might look like, sound like and feel like.

And they remembered all of it.

All those years later. In a shop, completely unprompted.

I'd had a student nurse with me that day. And afterwards, when we'd stepped away, they said,

“I hope you're my nurse when it's my turn.”

I've had this happen a few times over the years. Many of us will have. Someone you haven't seen for years will remind you of a pivotal moment in their lives you've almost forgotten.

But they do remember.

Not necessarily the clinical aspects of what we do.

But how they felt.

We all leave traces in people.

We don't often get to see what happens after we leave someone's life.

We don't know whether our care or our words have helped. Whether they made something just a little less frightening, or easier to bear.

It was one of those moments where you realise that something you did, on what felt like one ordinary day, wasn't ordinary to everyone else.

We don't always get to witness the ending of the stories we enter.

Yesterday, I got a glimpse of what stayed.

And I'm grateful for that.

10/08/2026

This weekend I strained my back.

With such rainy weather, I ended up going to the launderette with a large basket of wet weekend washing that felt twice as heavy.

The shops were closed by the afternoon. Yet there were no available parks close by. Except for two empty mobility parks outside.

I made a snap decision, and parked in one of them, carried my basket in, and was back at my car within 20 seconds.

As I got back in, the people beside me wound down their window and yelled what they thought of me, as they drove off.

They didn't know I'd hurt my back. They didn't know I'd wrestled with the decision before I'd actually stopped.

They saw a moment and filled in the rest of the story themselves.

And strangely, it wasn't their words that surprised me. It was the speed of their reaction.

The judgement and anger. The absolute certainty they had about me.

It took me back almost 30 years.

I'd just come home from a friend's wedding in the Caribbean. Three weeks of sun, a deep tan, and my hair braided with gorgeous plaited extensions for the very first time.

I was walking out of a shop, dressed in my usual relaxed colourful boho style, when two older women sitting on a bench loudly tutted at me.

I remember thinking they'd decided I was some sort of hippy.

Who knows?

But instead of getting reactive, I saw an opportunity and asked if I could join them.

And of course we started talking.

Somewhere in the conversation they learned I was an ICU nurse and a homeowner, and that I'd recently returned from holiday.

As I got up to leave, one turned to the other and said.

"Oh, what a nice girl."

Neither encounter was really about me. Both were about the story someone had built from what they could see.

But thirty years ago, I was curious enough to challenge their perception.

I wonder how often I still don't.

Not everyone carries what they're carrying where we can see it.

Nicky Cooper - Wellness & Wellbeing Practitioner RN MSc

11/09/2026

08/09/2026

05/09/2026

01/09/2026

28/08/2026

24/08/2026

21/08/2026

18/08/2026

14/08/2026

10/08/2026

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